In 1895, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor for charges of “gross indecency.” Over his time at Reading Gaol, the Irish poet and playwright was granted special permission to keep books in his cell, amass a small library, and leave his light on late to read them.
Among the first titles requested were The Confessions of St Augustine and The Renaissance by Walter Pater, a key artistic text that helped inspire Wilde’s aesthetic. In one letter asking for new books, Wilde wrote: “The Library here contains no example of Thackeray’s or Dickens’s novels. I feel sure that a complete set of their works would be as great a boon to many amongst the other prisoners as it certainly would be to myself.”
Though the celebrated writer would pass away just three years after his release, his wit and wisdom continues to inspire readers the world over. Find a list of the works included in Wilde’s prison library below (compiled by The Independent) and more insight into his personal library via Thomas Wright’s Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde.
Collected Works of Matthew Arnold
City of God by St. Augustine (also rec’d by Martin Luther King Jr.)
The Confessions by St. Augustine
Works by Charles Baudelaire
The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
The Prioress’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Divine Comedy by Dante (also rec’d by Patti Smith, Susan Sontag & Tina Turner)
La Vita Nuova by Dante
Collected Works of John Dryden
Trois Contes by Gustave Flaubert
La Tentation de St Antoin by Gustave Flaubert
Illumination by Harold Frederic
The Passes of the Pyrenees by Charles L Freeston
Faust by Goethe (also rec’d by Susan Sontag)
Brittany by Baring Gould
Collected Works of Hafiz
The Well-Beloved by Thomas Hardy
The Longer Poems of John Keats
Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature by William Paton Ker
The Courtship of Morrice Buckler: A Romance by AEW Mason
An Essay on Comedy by George Meredith
The History of the Jews by Henry Hart Milman
History of Latin Christianity by Henry Hart Milman
History of Rome by Theodor Mommsen
Juvenile Offenders by William Douglas Morrison
A History of Ancient Greek Literature by Gilbert Murray
Apologia Pro Vita Sua by John Henry Newman
Two Essays on Miracles by John Henry Newman
The Idea of a University by John Henry Newman
Essays on Grace by John Henry Newman
Provincial Letters by Blaise Pascal
Pensées by Blaise Pascal
The Renaissance by Walter Pater
Gaston de Latour by Walter Pater
Miscellaneous Studies by Walter Pater
Egyptian Decorative Art by WM Flinders Petrie
Letters and Memoir by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz
The Student’s Chaucer by Walter William Skeat
Collected Works of Edmund Spenser
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (also rec’d by Anthony Bourdain & Hayao Miyazaki)
Collected Works of August Strindberg
The Study of Dante by JA Symons
Richard Wagner’s letters to August Roeckel
Collected Works of William Wordsworth
(via The Independent)